What do you think?
Rate this book
Plats: A Novel
The first novel by American writer, John Trefry, 'Plats' is a meditation on life in Los Angeles. In the tradition of the prose form-making of Michel Butor, 'Plats' is a masonry text built of modular narrative elements and settings, a textual city to be explored by the reader, where in a single breathe coexist dusty apartments and vacant beaches, reinvention and suicide, haunting and hiding, endless labor and crippling idleness, mint tea and storm waters. The city changes secretly, behind layers of paint and pelts of mildew. Against this stagnant backdrop, inhabitants struggle to observe the passage of their lives. With the hypnotic action of a rising and falling tide, the reader floats through a suite of interchangeable women looking for escape in place-names, in the changing minutiae of their skin and clothing, in the hydrological cycle of a seaside desert, and in the possibilities apparent in one another's lives. They steal each other's shoes, mail, apartments, and identities with the hope of getting one step closer to distinguishing themselves from the refuse of the unchanging city.
- GenresFiction
184 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2008
7 people are currently reading
319 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 5, 2023
A pile of decaying memories hallucinated into a saline crystal.
November 12, 2017
If Chantal Akerman had a threesome with Marguerite Duras and Gaston Bachelard and produced a magical lovechild humming with a strange beneath-the-surface luminescence, it would be something like Plats.
July 5, 2018
Plats is a haunted novel. To read it is inhabit a ghost, witness to the expansion and contraction of time and space, like a sleeping animal's breathing. Memories generate, repeat and diminish with beautiful and terrible opacity. A lovely, awe-inspiring hallucination made text.
February 18, 2016
Some books are like video games. They offer a world in which to inhabit, with “you” as the protagonist/narrator, instead of the presence of a narrative voice guiding you by the wrist. Plats is one of them, and it belongs to same genre of games as Myst or Riven, or The Invention of Morel. I tend to assume (and I don’t think this tendency is all that uncommon among readers) that a novel will take on a classic narrative structure, even if the narrator is unreliable and the plot arrangement is irregular, so reading the attached interview with the author first helped me to know what I was getting into. While I’ll probably always prefer books with at least the semblance or reference to theme, plot, and narrative, I’m always glad to encounter well-written books of this kind, what for me might as well be considered an anti-novel, because it gives me the opportunity to stretch my mind and accept a larger definition for what the “novel” can be.
Once I’d accepted that this book wasn’t going to tell me a story, but rather give me a world in which to roam, I was able to dig in a bit deeper. Given the visual landscape of Plats, which could be the name of the ficticious – or digital seems more precise – world on display here, one could technically get lost forever. There are so many ethereal realms, and Inception-like avenues to go down, or up, or upside-down on, I don’t know what an end to them would mean. This can be cognitively taxing as a reader. Imagining a world – not devoid of emotion but emotionally ambiguous, which I believe is intentional – and filling in the blanks yourself isn’t always easy. Doors, rooms, streets, tend to multiply. There is definitely the menacing sense of being in a dream you can’t wake up from, or worse, being trapped in a 3D model of a level having killed all the bad guys but with no idea where the door is that will get you outta there. If that's the downside, the benefit is that this framework gives one an endless amount of options. Anecdote: When I was a young lad, I had some friends that used to draw their own RPG-maps on graph paper. They'd come to lunch, and sit with their stacks of paper, looking at them in awe for the duration of the break. I never knew what was so goddamn fascinating about those pages, but they knew; they saw something. Plats the universe is like that; with a little mindpower, one could create their own fan-fiction easily. Finding meaning and fasciiination all depends on the reader, looker, Player 1.
In terms of literature, the signifiers were many. Syntactically I picked up on Cormac McCarthy, especially with regard to description, although the language isn’t archaic. In terms of overall presentation I was reminded of Alain Robbe-Grillet and the French nouveau romain school, while it also reminded me of other more-treacherous labyrinths like Maldoror and Stig Dagerman’s Island of the Doomed.
This is definitely worth checking out, as long as you have the right mindset going into it. Queue up some Memory Vague by Oneohtrix Point Never, let go of all notions of destination, and let the world be your guide.
Once I’d accepted that this book wasn’t going to tell me a story, but rather give me a world in which to roam, I was able to dig in a bit deeper. Given the visual landscape of Plats, which could be the name of the ficticious – or digital seems more precise – world on display here, one could technically get lost forever. There are so many ethereal realms, and Inception-like avenues to go down, or up, or upside-down on, I don’t know what an end to them would mean. This can be cognitively taxing as a reader. Imagining a world – not devoid of emotion but emotionally ambiguous, which I believe is intentional – and filling in the blanks yourself isn’t always easy. Doors, rooms, streets, tend to multiply. There is definitely the menacing sense of being in a dream you can’t wake up from, or worse, being trapped in a 3D model of a level having killed all the bad guys but with no idea where the door is that will get you outta there. If that's the downside, the benefit is that this framework gives one an endless amount of options. Anecdote: When I was a young lad, I had some friends that used to draw their own RPG-maps on graph paper. They'd come to lunch, and sit with their stacks of paper, looking at them in awe for the duration of the break. I never knew what was so goddamn fascinating about those pages, but they knew; they saw something. Plats the universe is like that; with a little mindpower, one could create their own fan-fiction easily. Finding meaning and fasciiination all depends on the reader, looker, Player 1.
In terms of literature, the signifiers were many. Syntactically I picked up on Cormac McCarthy, especially with regard to description, although the language isn’t archaic. In terms of overall presentation I was reminded of Alain Robbe-Grillet and the French nouveau romain school, while it also reminded me of other more-treacherous labyrinths like Maldoror and Stig Dagerman’s Island of the Doomed.
This is definitely worth checking out, as long as you have the right mindset going into it. Queue up some Memory Vague by Oneohtrix Point Never, let go of all notions of destination, and let the world be your guide.
December 17, 2021
I have never forgotten this one time when I was 16 or 17, and I was staying at a very old campground with my youth group on some kind of spiritual retreat. I wasn't particularly happy to be there, and thus I spent a fair amount of time in my bunk, grumpily staring at the wall. One evening, as my mind wandered and my eyes began to unfocus, a small section of the wallpaper pushed forward, like a Magic Eye picture, perfectly clear in 3-dimensions against its otherwise blurry backdrop. It wasn't shaped like anything in particular - some 20 years later, I remember it looking a little like Massachusetts, only standing up on its end - but it was unmistakably there. I went back and found it again and again throughout the week, needing to confirm that it wasn't a trick of the hour, or the light, or my own disquieted mind, but it was always there, in the same place. I couldn't begin to imagine how such an aberration came to be created, or who would have bothered to create it, or why, but it's the only thing I still remember from what was, at the time, meant to be a serious week of religious self-discovery. It's also my best comp for what it feels like to read John Trefry's entrancing 2008 novel Plats.
Now, Plats says "a novel" on its cover, and I don't feel like it's in any way my place to argue, but to the average (or even avid) reader, it might feel a bit more akin to poetry, or even visual art. Each of its 156 pages is divided into three 11-line paragraphs (these cartographic stanzas are, presumably, the titular plats), each with the sturdy structure of a classical still-life. But as Trefry retraces his imagismal maps again and again, you begin to feel like you're viewing those still-lifes through a phoropter. They are textured, and endlessly mutable - coming in and out of focus as they attune to your own perceptions of them. The ways in which he describes the play of light against a bunched curtain, or traces the contours of the human body in extraordinary detail, or finds untold beauty in revisiting words as banal as "mauve" or "chairleg," all suggest the deliberate patience of an artist who prefers to watch his time-lapse videos in real time; who will stare at the ground all day just to see how his shadow dances with the sun.
If there's a story, it's maybe as simple as the story of a man who wakes up one day and goes for a walk, maybe through the residential part of his city, maybe down to the ocean; a man who leaves a woman behind, and maybe sees another somewhere along the way - a man who returns to his apartment, and the first woman; who sits at his desk and looks out the window; a man who maybe watches the sunset, and goes back to sleep, while the second woman wanders through the night. Maybe. If I read it again, right now, I might feel completely differently about all of that, so take it with a grain of salt. Trefry's writing has a way of diffusing as you read it. Each plat curls around you like a wisp of smoke, hugs you tight, and then either descends warmly down and inward, into your cells and marrow, or expands freely out and upward, lost to the ether the moment you enter the next. It's story is not to be followed so much as wandered around in. Likewise appropriately, the Mondrian-esque cover art - a grid of rectangles in shades of institutional grey and unfurnished studio beige - calls to mind both the exacting calculus of zoomed-out city planning, and the infinite respawning of fractal theory; the shapes are so recognizable you might not give them a second look, but if ever you do, the possibilities contained therein are endless. Every morning becomes a birth; every day a lifetime; every night a death.
And so, perhaps more than any of the minor incidents summarized in the previous paragraph, Plats is the story of a man communing with his exact place in the universe; perceiving his surroundings as an enormous, ideal machine with some higher function he can only barely glimpse, and himself as a living cog, no more or less important than anyone or anything else; a man mapping the world to the locus of his own eyes. I never read Plats for more than 10 pages at a time, both because I wanted to give it space to breathe, and also because I just didn't want it to end. This is the kind of voluminous, transcendent writing that fills your head up like a hot air balloon and sets you drifting away, by turns recalling the astral projectionist prose of J.M.G. Le Clezio, the tireless camera of Werner Herzog combing the desert for Fata Morgana, and even monumental texts like Leaves of Grass and Walden. This is rarefied air, to be sure, but Plats feels like that brand of rare, inspired work - art that makes you stare at the wall until it shows you something new; that digs down so deeply and intentionally on the everyday, that it makes you question what else you were even thinking about before you started reading it; what else there possibly even could be; art that makes you remember anew the inherent wonder of just being alive.
Now, Plats says "a novel" on its cover, and I don't feel like it's in any way my place to argue, but to the average (or even avid) reader, it might feel a bit more akin to poetry, or even visual art. Each of its 156 pages is divided into three 11-line paragraphs (these cartographic stanzas are, presumably, the titular plats), each with the sturdy structure of a classical still-life. But as Trefry retraces his imagismal maps again and again, you begin to feel like you're viewing those still-lifes through a phoropter. They are textured, and endlessly mutable - coming in and out of focus as they attune to your own perceptions of them. The ways in which he describes the play of light against a bunched curtain, or traces the contours of the human body in extraordinary detail, or finds untold beauty in revisiting words as banal as "mauve" or "chairleg," all suggest the deliberate patience of an artist who prefers to watch his time-lapse videos in real time; who will stare at the ground all day just to see how his shadow dances with the sun.
If there's a story, it's maybe as simple as the story of a man who wakes up one day and goes for a walk, maybe through the residential part of his city, maybe down to the ocean; a man who leaves a woman behind, and maybe sees another somewhere along the way - a man who returns to his apartment, and the first woman; who sits at his desk and looks out the window; a man who maybe watches the sunset, and goes back to sleep, while the second woman wanders through the night. Maybe. If I read it again, right now, I might feel completely differently about all of that, so take it with a grain of salt. Trefry's writing has a way of diffusing as you read it. Each plat curls around you like a wisp of smoke, hugs you tight, and then either descends warmly down and inward, into your cells and marrow, or expands freely out and upward, lost to the ether the moment you enter the next. It's story is not to be followed so much as wandered around in. Likewise appropriately, the Mondrian-esque cover art - a grid of rectangles in shades of institutional grey and unfurnished studio beige - calls to mind both the exacting calculus of zoomed-out city planning, and the infinite respawning of fractal theory; the shapes are so recognizable you might not give them a second look, but if ever you do, the possibilities contained therein are endless. Every morning becomes a birth; every day a lifetime; every night a death.
And so, perhaps more than any of the minor incidents summarized in the previous paragraph, Plats is the story of a man communing with his exact place in the universe; perceiving his surroundings as an enormous, ideal machine with some higher function he can only barely glimpse, and himself as a living cog, no more or less important than anyone or anything else; a man mapping the world to the locus of his own eyes. I never read Plats for more than 10 pages at a time, both because I wanted to give it space to breathe, and also because I just didn't want it to end. This is the kind of voluminous, transcendent writing that fills your head up like a hot air balloon and sets you drifting away, by turns recalling the astral projectionist prose of J.M.G. Le Clezio, the tireless camera of Werner Herzog combing the desert for Fata Morgana, and even monumental texts like Leaves of Grass and Walden. This is rarefied air, to be sure, but Plats feels like that brand of rare, inspired work - art that makes you stare at the wall until it shows you something new; that digs down so deeply and intentionally on the everyday, that it makes you question what else you were even thinking about before you started reading it; what else there possibly even could be; art that makes you remember anew the inherent wonder of just being alive.
April 30, 2020
what to do, to map the city back onto the self, to map the word back onto a mediation of tangible experience, to mediate the world in formal conversation with the word? essential
December 6, 2018
The Inside the Castle website talks about publishing books that know they are books. I had a hard time really grasping what exactly that meant until I read Plats.
After talking with John on my podcast I began to understand a little more. And now that I have finished the book and thought on it for a few days, I'm afraid to say that I know what it means, but I do.
I can't tell a potential reader of this book what combination of books or authors I think best describes this book, because it is a book that knows that it is a book. It is a book that knows that is itself. If you are thinking about reading Plats, you should. That is the way that I think reading should work. The prose is careful yet surprising. The characters are ambiguous yet flushed with blood and guts in a landscape that feels like that matte painting in Hellbound: Hellraiser 2.
I like that the book took a long time for me to read, about two or three minutes per page. I like that the book didn't give me the respite of chapters that end two lines into a page, giving my eyes precious lines of white to glance over and gasp before starting anew. I like certain words that I saw being used over and over again. I like second person. I like that this is a weird book that lays in the no-man's land between dense, surreal, existential horror, and impenetrable academic experimentation. John Trefry is an architect, and when you read this book you can tell. Whatever that means.
The book is worth the time. Reading the book made me want to work on my own writing, so much so that I had to often stop to push my fingers into my phone's screen to get out a few sentences before I could continue. That, to me - for me, is what makes a book good.
After talking with John on my podcast I began to understand a little more. And now that I have finished the book and thought on it for a few days, I'm afraid to say that I know what it means, but I do.
I can't tell a potential reader of this book what combination of books or authors I think best describes this book, because it is a book that knows that it is a book. It is a book that knows that is itself. If you are thinking about reading Plats, you should. That is the way that I think reading should work. The prose is careful yet surprising. The characters are ambiguous yet flushed with blood and guts in a landscape that feels like that matte painting in Hellbound: Hellraiser 2.
I like that the book took a long time for me to read, about two or three minutes per page. I like that the book didn't give me the respite of chapters that end two lines into a page, giving my eyes precious lines of white to glance over and gasp before starting anew. I like certain words that I saw being used over and over again. I like second person. I like that this is a weird book that lays in the no-man's land between dense, surreal, existential horror, and impenetrable academic experimentation. John Trefry is an architect, and when you read this book you can tell. Whatever that means.
The book is worth the time. Reading the book made me want to work on my own writing, so much so that I had to often stop to push my fingers into my phone's screen to get out a few sentences before I could continue. That, to me - for me, is what makes a book good.
February 10, 2025
A gallery of vignettes, and though of a piece, it could work in some format where they are made random, or patterned to modulate towards/away from any number of attributes or affectations. It's really quite like wandering through a museum, and in lieu of narrative, the mind tends to wander, and you can choose whether to go back over the paintings you didn't fully take in.
I found the sentences in this book extraordinary - a sort of strongly-stated impressionism sketching one ambiance after another and exceedingly little movement, and none meaning any more than its brushstroke upon the image on the page.
I found the sentences in this book extraordinary - a sort of strongly-stated impressionism sketching one ambiance after another and exceedingly little movement, and none meaning any more than its brushstroke upon the image on the page.
April 26, 2025
Plats come in threes.
Plats are repetitive.
Plats are plats.
Plats are repetitive.
Plats are plats.
August 3, 2017
Gathered my thoughts into a review which can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2017/08/02/lo...
September 15, 2014
Still processing the complexities of this text. Shades of Butor, Sollers and even Baudelaire in Trefry's careful, even sometimes carefully grotesque, prosody -- so, French -- but this is a book that is deeply American in its concern with the self. PLATS is also one of the most original meditations on sensory experience I can recall reading. And, yes, there is a narrative here, and it possesses mythic dimensions, but this is a book the requires you to perceive it first and only to read it "later," that is, through the medium of own deliberation.
August 28, 2017
I'll admit this one was tough, the literary style being very much not my 'normal' fare. Usually I read the blurb decide if I like the gist of the story and that's it. This book wasn't quite like that. The characters and their stories always seemed just out of reach to me and it took a lot of concentration to keep going BUT the language was amazing, creating some fantastic visual imagery which made sure I kept on to the end. As I read, I had the sensation of drifting through transient scenes as the day and night of city life unfolded, mirroring the ebb and flow of the tide at the city's shore, not solid always fluid. So for me, a different but enjoyable read.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews